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From Charles Kuralt’s A Life on the Road
If you are in search of the authentic America, seek out the little river that runs under the bridge at Concord. Pay your respects to the Suwannee, the Shenandoah, the Appomattox. Walk in the grass beside the Little Bighorn and think about what happened there. Spend an afternoon waist-deep in the Henry’s Fork with a fly rod in your hand, in the fall when the trumpeter swans fly low over the river. Walk down to the banks of the Missouri, which used to change its course so often that farmers along it complained they never knew whether their crop was going to be corn or catfish.
America is a great story, and there is a river on every page of it.
From Carl Sagan’s Cosmos
The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us---there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.
The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home. In a cosmic perspective, most human concerns seem insignificant, even petty. And yet our species is young and curious and brave and shows much promise. In the last few millennia we have made the most astonishing and unexpected discoveries about the Cosmos and our place within it, explorations that are exhilarating to wonder. They remind us that humans have evolved to wonder, that understanding is a joy, that knowledge is a prerequisite to survival.
From the Bible (Ruth I.16)
Where thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God, my God.
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